“The Anti-Social Century:” Inside America’s Epidemic of Solitude

PAULA NEWTON, ANCHOR: Now, we were just talking, right, TikTok and other social media platforms, we should add, have faced scrutiny from health experts for increasing loneliness, particularly among teenagers. Now, as U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy nears the end of his second term as the nation’s doctor, his parting prescription is to foster a stronger sense of community. Now, data from his department show Americans are hanging out in person less and less, and with each passing year. That is the focus, in fact, of Derek Thompson’s latest piece for The Atlantic. It is “The Antisocial Century. He joins Michel Martin to discuss what can be done.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Derek Thompson, thanks so much for talking with us.

DEREK THOMPSON, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: It’s great to be here. Thank you.

MARTIN: So, your new piece, cover story for The Atlantic, is called “The Antisocial Century.” You say that this self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of 21st century America. Why do you say that?

THOMPSON: So, for 60 years, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has asked Americans how they spend their day, how they spend their week, you know, how much time you spend sleeping, how much time you spend eating food. And what they found is that in the last 20 years in particular, the number of Americans who — or the amount of time that Americans spend in face-to-face socializing has declined for every single demographic. So, it’s not just young people or young adults or middle-aged people or old people, it’s all ages. It’s not just black or white, it’s all ethnicities. It’s not just college graduates or people who didn’t go to college, it’s every single category of education attainment. Every single category you could possibly think of, demographically speaking, is spending less time in face-to-face socializing than they did 20 years ago, or really than they did 60 years ago. And that’s why the headline finding here is that we are spending, Americans are spending, more time alone than in any period for which we have trustworthy data.

MARTIN: You also noticed something, and you actually open your piece with something that you noticed in your own town, why don’t you just tell that story?

THOMPSON: Sure. So, as I was writing this article, my wife and I and my baby daughter, we went out to a Mexican restaurant here in Chapel Hill. And we get in, you know, around 5:00, our daughter eats dinner early and there’s no one in the restaurant, but there’s a bar and there are like nine paper bags, large paper bags on that bar, along with a sign that says bar seating closed. And I thought, that’s interesting. They closed the bar to become this sort of like depot for takeaway food. And over the next half hour, like five, 10, 12 people walked into the restaurant, saying nothing to anybody in the restaurant, grab a bag and leave. And I thought, this is crazy. Business is booming for this restaurant, but no one’s sitting down in chairs and no one’s talking to each other because takeaway has exceeded tables as the main business of this restaurant. So, I did some research and I found out that, in fact, according to the National Restaurant Association, 74 percent of all traffic to restaurants in 2023 was for off premises sales. That is, takeaway and delivery. And that was like a, oh, my God. What an incredible metaphor for this antisocial century that I’m trying to write about, the bar, the place where you should be having conversations with the strangers or friends in your community has been closed and turned into a silent depot where people come and without saying a word to each other, just grab food so they can eat back at their house where, by the way, they’re spending more time than in any other period for which we have good data. So, once I saw that scene, I thought, well, it’s over. Obviously, this is going to be the first 1,000 words of the essay.

MARTIN: Now, obviously, COVID, you know, COVID played a role here. A lot of us were forced to spend time alone, or at least not going to places we were used to going. But you say this goes beyond COVID, that this is a trend that started long before the COVID pandemic.

THOMPSON: Yes, I think it’s a 60-year-old trend that was briefly accelerated by the pandemic. But there’s some information that suggests that we spent more time alone in 2023 than we did in 2021 when all the vaccines rolled out. So, this is something that is bigger than COVID. Even if, of course, people are going to hear solitude and think, well, I spent that year basically in lockdown or in relative isolation. So, when I roll back the clock to the middle of the 20th century and think, how did this happen, especially starting in the 1950s and 1960s? You know, Robert Putnam wrote a famous book called “Bowling Alone,” where he researched this question in depth, a book of hundreds of pages of graphs and research. And the most compelling information to me, the most compelling point that he made to me about the causes of the antisocial century is that in the 1950s, 1960s, you saw the emergence of several really important technologies that changed our all of our lives. First, you had the car, which privatized our lives, allowed us to drive away from cities towards suburbs. We spent more time alone in homes in our backyards. Then the 1950s and 1960s, you have the popularization of the television. And the car privatized our lives. I think the television privatized our leisure. There’s some evidence suggesting that between the 1960s and 1990s the typical American got about six extra hours of leisure time per week. So, what do we do with that extra 300 hours per year? You can ask yourself or ask a friend, if you had an extra 300 hours per year, what would you do at that time? Would you learn a new language? Would you learn a new instrument? Would you play sports? It turned out that people spent almost all that time watching television. Nothing wrong with a little bit of TV, but 300 extra hours of TV a year is a lot of TV.

MARTIN: OK. So, this obviously invites the question, is this bad? And you suggest that it’s not great. So, what’s wrong with people spending more time alone? Because a lot of people say well, this is me time. I’m just kind of refreshing myself.

THOMPSON: Yes, it’s bad. But let me be clear about exactly why it’s bad. I’m the father of a 17-month-old. So, I know as well as anyone how precious and frankly, how close to heaven one night alone away from the screaming baby can be. I mean, it is the next thing to God. That said, as with any, you know, therapeutic, the dose matters. There’s a difference between spending one night alone between saying, I feel great about not being around people today, I need to recharge, and spending more time alone year after year after year and decade after decade after decade. That’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about a kind of overdose on solitude. And there’s research suggesting that if you ask people, how much time do you spend with folks and how much time do you spend alone? The people who spend more time alone tend to be much less happy. And there’s one study that found that a 5 percent reduction in socializing time reduced happiness as much as a 10 percent reduction in income. If you think how happy would you be if your boss suddenly said, I’m going to, you know, slash your salary by 10 percent, that’s the effect of just a few years of increased alone time in America. So, I think quiet is blessedness. And I think that alone time can be a true salve for the soul, but the amount of socialized — social isolation that people are experiencing in America today, I think is bad for us as individuals and I think it’s bad for us as a community.

MARTIN: I want to quote something you wrote in the piece. You said that solitude and loneliness are not the same. You quote the sociologist, Eric Klinenberg. He said, it’s actually a very healthy, emotional response to feel some loneliness. But how should we think about this difference? Because, you know, some of the great — gosh, some of the great moral thinkers, religious leaders, all spent time in quiet contemplation, you know, alone, Jesus, John the Baptist, Moses, Buddha, the Buddha, you know, they all — these figures all spent sort of time sort of thinking alone. But you said that there’s something that goes beyond that. You call it sort of antisocial. It’s not kind of pro-social. It’s antisocial.

THOMPSON: I want to make two points because what you’re saying about Jesus and John the Baptist, you know, was really galvanizing to me. The first point is on loneliness. I think loneliness can be healthy. Loneliness is the experience difference between the amount of social connection that you have and the amount of social connection that you want to have. So, many times we feel like at the end of a week or a few weeks like, oh, I’m feeling kind of lonely. I want to reach out to a friend. I want to see someone. I want to get a drink. That’s a wonderful, healthy feeling. What we’re experiencing instead. I’m afraid, with decade after decade of rising aloneness is the opposite of loneliness. Loneliness is the instinct to be around people. But for many, in particular young people today, I see there’s the instinct to be with yourself, to have me time followed by me time followed by me time. That’s not responding to loneliness. That is something else. The second thing I want to say is that, as I was finishing this piece, I was watching a video that the author, David Foster Wallace, made where he’s talking about the death of quiet in America and how people just can’t be by themselves and be quiet anymore. And I think that to a certain extent, the phone contaminates our quiet. You know, if Jesus went away for, you know, his days in the desert and had the phone on him, he was constantly check me back on Roman Twitter, I don’t think he would have all the revelations that he had because he’d be sucked in to the crowd think. I mean, I’m being a little bit facetious here, but there’s — it’s important for solitude to be truly quiet. But at one thing I think that these phones do is that they make our time in crowds feel a little bit more alone because we can always just pull out our palms and look down into our palms and be away from the crowd. But also, they make our solitude more crowded. We can be home alone, wanting to just recharge, wanting to have great thoughts or look inside of ourselves, and we can’t help but pull out of our — pull out our phones and dip into social media and become contaminated by crowd think. So, I think there’s a huge difference between the kind of quite solitude that can be truly replenishing and the kind of solitude that most people experience when they’re on their couches flick, flick, flicking on social media.

MARTIN: But why is it that — you know, we say this all the time, we’re social beings, right? So, I’m just wondering how it happened that we just — were these conscious choices that people have been making for themselves or have their sort of social circumstances dictated this and they’ve — we’ve adapted to it.

THOMPSON: You know, Eric Klinenberg, the sociologist who you’ve quoted, told me at one point during my reporting that we do choose, but we don’t choose the set of options that we have. And I think that our built environments in this case shape our choices. I think that it’s meaningful that while, you know, we’ve been talking, I think, rightly about the ways that our inner lives have changed with the rise of televisions and smartphones, there’s been physical world changes too as we drive out to the suburbs, we live further away from people, the amount of social infrastructure that’s been built in this country in the last 50 years clearly declined from its peak, maybe the 1950s and 1960s. So, there’s built environment changes that are really important. But I also think that maybe, you know, people are — don’t fully recognize what they’re choosing when they make decisions about their life. You know, when we stay at home and we watch Netflix or we order Chipotle, and God knows who hasn’t done that. I watch Netflix all the time. I order, you know, food to eat here at home all the time. When we make those choices, we aren’t calculating in that moment, here’s the hours we’re not spending with other people. Here’s them other hours we’re not spending with other people. So, what I wanted to do with this essay is to hold up a mirror to America and to say, here are the choices that you’re making every day to surround yourself with entertainment, to be in your home longer, and our homes are more convenient, more comfortable than they used to be. Here’s a set of choices that we’re making, and here’s the bill that’s come due. And the bill that’s come due is historic amounts of alone time in ways I think are changing our personality and changing our politics. So, I don’t know that people are fully cognizant of the costs of the choices that they’re making. My hope is that this helps them to see the receipt, the bill, so to speak of those choices.

MARTIN: But what about other costs that you see as being the price of all this aloneness? What are some of the other consequences that you see?

THOMPSON: Right. So, you’re talking about individual costs there. I mean, we have lots of really good data that suggests that young people have fewer friends than they used to have, go out with those friends less than they used to. And I think that’s a major problem. I also think that politically, this is creating major problems. You know, I talked to a Brown University researcher and author, Mark Dunkelman, I mean, it’s really compelling point that if you think about it in kind of an ironic way, in the age of the phone, our families are tighter than they used to be. You know, I text my wife all the time, which people are in touch with their kids, maybe more than they used to be. So, that inner ring of family is very, very tight. And then you can think of an outer ring of tribe where I’m very in touch with people who share my ideas about, you know, aloneness or economics or politics, whether it’s on Twitter or on e-mail or via group text. So, in a way, you have this weird situation where the inner ring of family is strengthened and the outer ring of tribe is strengthened. But there’s a middle ring, which is the village. And these are the people we live next to, they’re our neighbors, the people in our towns, and we don’t know them as well as we used to. And the reason I think that matters is that while family teaches us love, and while the tribe teaches us loyalty or ideology, I think the village teaches us tolerance. I think it is instructive of tolerance to be around people that you’re not related to, that you disagree with about things because you learn that when you — that you can disagree with people while still seeing them as fully human. And in the absence of a strong village-based culture in this country, I think you get politicians like Donald Trump, who are an all tribe, no village avatar of politics, and I also think that you have parties that don’t understand each other and want nothing to do with each other. There’s some polls suggesting that like Republican teenagers say that we’ll never date a Democrat and Democratic teenagers are even more likely to say they’ll never date a Republican. That’s a world where we have tight families and tight tribes, and we don’t know each other at the level of the village.

MARTIN: One of the things you said earlier is that we were talking about the difference between solitude and loneliness is that loneliness is a wish for company. And it makes me wonder, why don’t these people go out and do something?

THOMPSON: It’s a great big question. I don’t have a perfect answer, but I have a theory. I think that we’re disevolved to live in this attention environment. We’re constantly stimulated by novelty and entertainment. And if we’re on the internet and we’re in some, you know, political messaging area, outrage and outgroup animosity, you open up your phone and you’re immediately bombarded with this stimulus that gets your dopamine going. And I don’t think that we’ve spent enough time in this new attentional ecosystem to learn what to do with it. And many times, I think people find themselves so overwhelmed by the amount of dopamine and cortisol that they get going biochemically when they’re on their phones on their computers, but it’s somewhat exhausts them. And so, when they put their phone down or they close their computer, maybe a friend reaches out or says like, do you want to get a drink? They’re like, no, I’m exhausted. I don’t want to get a drink. I’m totally pooped. I mean, I’d spend all this time feeling angry and feeling at the cortisol rushing through my veins. No, I kind of want to just stay home. And so, I think it’s possible that we are tragically sapping our relationship with other people because we’re dumping all of our dopamine in our screens, we’re wasting our dopamine having these low rent versions of social interactions through our screens when we could have a much higher quality experience if we sometimes found a way to put these things down. But to the question, why don’t we put these things down? It’s because we’re disevolved to know what to do with these things. They’re so good at capturing one part of what makes us human, which is our sensitivity to novelty in our environment, that we forget this other part of being human, which is being there for each other.

MARTIN: What’s the answer to this besides put your phone down and go out and do something?

THOMPSON: Go out and just hanging out. I mean, the strange thing about the prescription to this disease is that it is simultaneously the easiest answer in the world and the hardest answer in the world. It’s easy because the antidote to loneliness is free and obvious, it’s being with other people. The problem is that being with other people can be a collective action problem. It’s hard to be with other people if the folks around you aren’t hanging out with each other. It’s hard to start a new ritual like, you know, dinner parties for your friends, if your friends never go out to dinner parties. So, it is a collective action problem and it’s difficult to solve, but I’m optimistic that we can solve it. Now, the difference between culture and say science is like science is a story that tends to move in one direction, drugs get a little better and then a little better and then a little better. Culture is this. Culture is progress and backlash and progress and backlash. And what’s the coolest type of genes, are they skinny or roomy or skinny or roomy? That’s culture. We’ve had decades now of an antisocial century, but they were preceded by decades of a very social century. In the early 1900s, we had rising rates of marriage and fertility and union membership and all different kinds of club associations. We had a moral revolution in this country, and we can have another moral revolution in this country, but I think it begins with the observation with a self-diagnosis that we’re doing this to ourselves. This is a disease we’re giving ourselves. That’s the bad news. But the good news is that we all have the cure. We know how to be with other people and we can just do it more.

MARTIN: Derek Thompson, thanks so much for talking with us.

THOMPSON: Thank you.

MARTIN: And let’s get together.

THOMPSON: I love it.